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Monthly Archives: July 2013

I’m sure you guys knew where I was headed with this. Pretty obvious what Lee’s new (satirical) product would be. Those are cow patties if you didn’t know.

The irony? Not only can you actually use a cow patty to do something, like fertilize the soil, I guarantee you a cow patty smells a lot better than Stan Lee Signature Cologne. I’m telling you, if Stan hired me to be a consultant I could help him make a lot more money.

I thought about using photoshop to add Lee’s “signature” logo to a whole line of Stan Lee Cow Patties. You could have:

But instead of designing the packaging for the Stan Lee Signature Cow Patty line of products, I’ll just leave it up to your imagination.

Plus I don’t want to make it look like too good of an idea — Stan might use it. That has been, after all… his pattern for the last 70 years…

Yippie kai yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, cow patty!

Anyway, here’s my final message for Stan Lee:

Mr. Lee, if you are out there. God bless you, sir. I genuinely apologize if I hurt your feelings over the years. You’re a public figure just like Obama or Clinton or Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock and so within the context of a daily Kirby weblog, I picked on you a few times. I pick on Tiger Woods, Justin Bieber, everybody. Like those guys, you should feel lucky to be rich and famous and beloved by everyone worldwide except for a few Kirby historians.

I wish you no ill will, Mr. Lee. I loved your comics when I was 10-years-old in the 70s. I actually wish you the best. I just hope you sit down and do a serious interview at some point and really tell us about your relationship with Jack Kirby. We know all your stories you’ve told many times. Instead of those, please search your memory, sir, think about your decade working with Jack in the 1960s, and maybe throw Jack a tiny bone. Maybe admit he sorta’ helped you create something like FF. or Hulk. Or X-Men. Or Thor. Or Nick Fury. Or Spider-man. Or Avengers. Or any of the supporting characters. Was even one of the ideas his? Maybe he threw an idea in there somewhere during the initial creation of the characters? Even one? Just let people know the guy was more than your penciler following your orders.

I am a true believer, Stan. I truly believe you can and will set the record straight — because it’s the right thing to do.

I know the anticipation is killing you all as you sit on the edge of your seat wondering what revolutionary new product your Generalissimo — your beloved Fearless Leader, the Greatest Writer ever to work in comics, the Patron Saint of Comics — is going to release. But I got a link to an article on Lee’s cologne (see below) from a reader that I figured I’d discuss first.

Stan is so lovable in these advertisements, no wonder people hate me so much for goofing on him.

A 90-year-old man on the box with his shirt unbuttoned, showing off that manly tanned chest — now there’s an image that makes me want to run out and buy a men’s perfume product pronto. Hey, “purchase perfume product pronto!” I just sorta’ made a Lee-alliteration! You Lee cologne people should hire me, I can do your next ad campaign!

You gotta love a man-perfume with some Perestroika in it. 🙂 One of Gorbachev’s old socks was mixed into the master batch of Stan Lee cologne.

I’d be more likely to buy a cologne with Gorbachev on the box, at least he actually did something.

Anyway, before the BIG REVEAL where we get to see Stan Lee’s brand new all-American product (or actually his whole new line of products — Stan is never content to sell just one thing, True Believers), thanks to a reader for sending in a link to this article:

By the way what the hell happened to the Huffington Post. Now they publish lame articles from other lame publications? Didn’t they used to actually go out and report actual news? Guess a corporate monster gobbled them up too and now they are part of the global propaganda machine.

Some Lee quotes from the article:

By email, Lee explained his reasoning: “I felt a touch of villainy added to the scent would make it more interesting and be of greater appeal to females who always find a villain interesting if he’s rich and handsome — and smells good.

“In a perfect world, I’d also want to add a whiff of comicbook store aroma — the smell of newsprint and colored ink, the rush of enthusiasm and the thrill of discovery,” Lee added.

Lee originally claimed he was surprised by the offer to be a shill for some lame cologne.

Lee joked by email that his initial reaction to the idea was, “A Stan Lee cologne??!! Who are they kidding?”

Funny because that is the reaction of a sane human being, especially a 90-year-old human being with millions and millions of dollars. But of course with Lee since he seems incabable of telling the truth, and he’s incabable of dropping the endless shtick, it’s kinda hard to believe Lee wasn’t thrilled by the idea. Yay, more money!

Whoa, only 25 bucks! What a bargain. You know how many bottles of that you could get for the $500,000.00 Batman page?

And notice it’s “colognes” plural, so there must be a whole line of Lee perfume. Yay!

The dude signed his name on an entire line of sugar water and I’m the bad guy for calling Lee a snake oil salesman for the last decade. Trust me I wish I wasn’t right. I wish Stan would spend less time trying to sell you garbage and take even two hours out of his schedule to do an honest interview where he discusses the truth about the Kirby/Lee collaboration. Clearly though Lee has better things to do…

Addendum:

By the way, for those of you out there who still don’t seem to get the joke, I’ll clearly spell it out for you — for 50 years now there have been people in the comics community who have been claiming Stan Lee was a snake oil salesman. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and for the most part I get shouted down and insulted.

Now… Stan Lee is literally a snake oil salesman! It’s no longer a metaphor. Do you see the irony of that, or are we at the point that people are so braindead they can barely contemplate any concept that doesn’t involve Justin Bieber or Kim Kardashian.

Wrapping up my comments on the Facebook criticisms of my Stan Lee posts and the future of Kirby Dynamics…

It isn’t even at the scholarly level presented in the JK
Collector, but rather comes off as a strange internet rant
from what should be a cool museum. Carry on…

I received an email from Rand Hoppe telling me the answer is no. No, Rand is not interested in me posting a pencil scan of Jack’s art, the published page of Jack’s art from my files, the original art (if I can find it), and some commentary every day until 2018 because the Kirby Museum has different plans for the pencil scans. Which is great. That will give me plenty of extra free time. 🙂

Woo hoo!

I was willing to post a pencil scan every day to promote Jack and build up excitement for his 100th birthday, but now that I think about it…

Oh well.

A volunteer orgainization is gonna turn down someone making a commitment to work for free every day until 2018? You know what you have to say:

“Whaddaya gonna do, eh?”

Lots of other things to do. Lots of other fish in the sea.

Now that I think about it, it’s a relief the Museum turned down my offer to post a pencil scan every day for free for the next 5 years, I’m happy to pass the torch to the next generation of Kirby Museum students & volunteers interested in promoting Jack. Here’s the torch.

The real irony of the Facebooker’s comments on me and the Museum? The “Museum” has zero interest in me, or what I’m doing, or what I offer to do. I’m comic book rabble. The Museum tolerates me like the way a banker going to work steps over a homeless guy in the street.

And that’s great, I didn’t do this weblog so that people will line up and hug me at comic book conventions when I dress up as Wolverine.

Not that there’s anything wrong with comic cons. As I talked about before, I know a few people who work really hard, their life is very stressful, and going to a comic con is their vacation where they can dress up in a Star Trek outfit and party hardy for a weekend. Heck that girl below is pretty hot.

But at the moment, winning a popularity contest and slapping hands at comic cons is not my thing, I do a daily weblog about Jack Kirby to kind of balance out the fact that Marvel and Stan Lee have virtually erased the man from the history. And I’m glad of the fact that I can still share my honest opinions here. When that day has passed, Lee’s Origins will be gospel. But I am going to make some changes here at Kirby Dynamics soon.

Now that I’m going to go into semi-retirement, I encourage YOU, dear reader, to go ahead and do your own Daily Jack Kirby Weblog. Do a scholarly Daily Jack Kirby Weblog yourself instead of complaining about mine. I’m sure yours will be great. Get to work.

Use the money you make to buy Stan Lee Signature Cologne.

Boy that looks like it must smell real good. I guess the target demographic for that ad is ages 70 – 90? Lot of money to be made selling cologne to that age group.

Again, I do appreciate the comment. Thanks for sharing.

Addendum:

One more thing. My sincere advice, and I mean this from the heart (I’m not being sarcastic for a change, because I genuinely like trying to help people out). Just stop reading my weblog if it upsets you. Go for a walk or something.

There’s a billion other things to do in life besides reading stuff or watching stuff you don’t enjoy.

And don’t forget to visit a REAL scholarly weblog! Go to Stan Lee’s new weblog, and for gosh sakes, buy some Stan Lee cologne while you’re there. Women love the smell of awful man-perfume that reeks like nerve gas.

This ever happened to you? You’re hanging out with your buddies after Christmas in a restaurant and something noxious smashes into your nostrils like an atom bomb. Your nose feels like it’s been engulfed in flames. You’re being attacked by what seems to be chemical warfare!

You gotta pull your buddy off to the side and say, “Bro’, I don’t know if your wife gave you that cologne for Christmas, or your daughter? But when you walked into the room, it was as if someone had detonated a canister of anthrax. I mean, everyone in the whole room started choking.”

So your buddy turns red, heads into the bathroom and tries to scrub some of the poison off his skin, and fortunately for all… he never wears it again.

Cologne is the absolute most non-essential product on planet earth. It serves no purpose whatsoever. It is junk, crap, garbage, snake oil, piss-water, foul-smelling poison — and the fact that this may be one of the very last things Stan Lee plastered his name all over fits Lee’s life-long pattern. Stan Lee Signature Cologne is quintessential Stan Lee. He’s been doing this for 70 years now — selling nonsense. The image of Stan Lee as a Home Shopping Network huckster trying to get you to buy this awful brand of perfume is a perfect visual representation of his entire career.

This is Stan Lee’s true legacy. And he only has himself to blame.

Word to the wise: keep complaining about me goofing on Lee’s cologne — that just means I’ll keep writing about it.

But stripping the museum’s walls may not actually make economic sense.

“If the whole point is to maximize returns, you wouldn’t dump $3 billion worth of art on the market,” said Patty Gerstenblith, director of the Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law at DePaul University. “It would be against the long-term interest of the City of Detroit, and you probably would not get top dollar.”

Not only would flooding the art market potentially reduce the value of the works for sale, but offloading the art would deprive the city of a vital source of native revenue. In 2011, the state of Michigan earned more than $2 billion in tourist dollars, due purely to cultural institutions, according to a study of government statistics by the nonprofit advocacy group Art Serve Michigan. Businesses are also more likely to set up shop in cities with compelling cultural draws, Gerstenblith points out.

She says a fire sale is far from the only option. One possible alternative is an agreement akin to holding joint custody of the works with another museum. As an example of a working “partial interest” plan, Gerstenblith points to the Fisk University Museum in Tennessee. Last summer, the museum offset some of its parent institutions’ crushing debt by selling a 50 percent stake in its 101-piece collection of Renoirs, Picassos and Matisses — all donated by Georgia O’Keeffe — to Crystal Bridges, the ambitious private museum founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton.

Of course “stripping the museum’s walls may not actually make economic sense.” Duh. The federal reserve is printing like 80 billion dollars of fiat every month, just print up 3 billion dollars and give it to Detroit. Oh, but you mean we can’t just keep making more worthless paper money forever? You mean the people at Christie’s and billion dollar art collectors are working behind the scenes to get their claws into the “public’s” art?

Here’s an idea, turn the Detroit Museum into a shooting gallery. At least you’ll have plenty of people who will support your business.

I woudn’t be surprised if the Detroit art is “saved” in the short term, not that anybody is actually going to any Museums in Detroit right now unless they have a bullet-proof car, but long term this is just a tiny crack in the dam that is America. When entire cities go belly-up, third world status is just around the corner.

Museum director confirmed Christie’s officials visited in early June Detroit officials said the city didn’t invite Christie’s representatives to the museum The possible sale of art is one of the most controversial issues in the Detroit bankruptcy

DETROIT — Art critics and online commentators are blasting Christie’s, the New York-based auction house, for possibly angling for a piece of the action should the Detroit Institute of Arts have to sell part of its collection to satisfy creditors in the city’s bankruptcy.

DIA director Graham Beal confirmed that two officials from Christie’s visited the museum in early June, ostensibly to appraise works on view. With the city owing an estimated $18 billion to bondholders, pensioners and others, creditors have been eyeing the city-owned art at the DIA, whose collection is undoubtedly worth billions.

Culture reporter Judith Dobrzynski on Tuesday compared Christie’s behavior to a vulture. “Shame on Christie’s,” she wrote on her blog Real Clear Arts. “Sure, business is business, but let’s remember here that it is not the Detroit Institute of Arts that has mismanaged the city and led to the bankruptcy. … Is Christie’s so hard up that it will take any business, no matter how reprehensible?”

I lived in what the local media called a “high crime area” for many years, and when they would evict people from certain apartment complexes, the employees working for the apartments would throw all the tenants belongings out on the street corner. People would see all the free stuff, gather there, fight over the stuff and load up the tenants stuff into their cars as it was being thrown out. The tenants who got evicted from the apartment would come home from work and all their belongings would be gone (except for a few scraps). Same thing going on here, just that the people at Chrstie’s are gazillionaires so they’re backing up the Brinks truck. And this is coming to your city very soon.

Prepare to watch all of America’s masterpieces plundered and shipped overseas via Christie’s and other auction sites that make millions of dollars simply for being middle-men. But that’s America. Get paid just for having something of value pass through your hands. Remind you of somebody else we know?

Another comment. Again, sorry for the unprofessional text format. I Guess I have to literally write the posts at WordPress or use a Word document or my right margins are messed up.

Frank Burbrink: So if you complain that I shouldn’t dislike
(I never said outraged)

Feel free to complain about my dumb weblog all you want. I’m pointing out the fact that I remain baffled by Stan Lee fans. You people never explain to us why Lee is the “Greatest Writer in Comics History” or why Lee is the “Patron Saint of Comics.” All you all do is complain about Kirby fans like ME! I’m a nobody, an irrelevant dope with a forgettable weblog buried in a pile of billions and billions of forgettable weblogs.

…the anti-Lee blogs and rather focus on starving children,
then why are you even wasting your time writing about Kirby
or Lee?

This is not an “Anti-Lee blog.” what silly logic. That would be like saying if I do a daily John Lennon weblog, and I goof on Paul once in awhile I am doing an “Anti-Paul” blog. This is the typical warped logic that is making it impossible to engage in any type of reasonable dialogue in this country on any subject. No matter what you say or do you are demonized in the negative. I’ve written about 1400 posts over a period of 3 + years trying to promote Jack, but to some really this is nothing more than an “Anti-Lee blog.” I guess if I criticize our Government this is an “Anti-American” weblog? That’s where this country is headed, folks.

This has always been the biggest criticism of me over the
years: that I’m “obsessed” with Kirby. I thank you for
pointing that out because I need to do a FAQ on why I like
Kirby in the near future. I’ll add that to my to-do list.

As for my “Reality Check” post being “contrary.” Yeah, that
was the whole point: why are we arguing about comic books
when the world is falling apart. I was not only criticizing
Lee fans for complaining about my satire on Lee’s cologne,
that was a piece of conscious self-criticism that I was
directing at myself. I need to spend less time talking about comics too.

I’m not a Kirby “scholar.” I’m a blue collar guy. I could barely type 10 years ago, and trust me I took a lot of heat for the fact that I’m intellectually inferior to many of the comics “historians” who view me as nothing more than an ant ‘neath their mighty heels because they have more comic books than I do. I’m a student and a blogger, and one of the things I do at Kirby Dynamics is work out my own philosophy of life as I go along. I for one am glad a student is able to go through that journey on a Kirby Museum website. Or do you want the site to be dead? Silent? With no content or opinions? Just announcements about silly comic book conventions where people dress up as Klingons and Batman? Do you want the Museum to censor me because I made fun of Stan Lee cologne? Should the Museum eradicate my archives? Wipe all negative comments about Stan Lee off the site forever? God forbid anyone joke about Stan Lee on a “Kirby Museum” weblog. What a terrible crime.

Anyhow, instead of addressing the point that the JK Museum
doesn’t need to stoop to the level of attacking Lee over and
over again you have come up with the argument that we (or I)
shouldn’t point out how lame that strategy is but rather be
outraged by poverty, starvation and disease. Good call guys.

The Kirby Museum is not stooping to the level of attacking Stan Lee. I am. How many times do I have to repeat that? And to repeat my point which clearly seems to be lost on you: I remain blown-away by people on Facebook who complain about my satire of Stan Lee’s cologne when billions of people are suffering all over the world and millions are dying. To me, this is an interesting glimpse into our culture. Am I not allowed to make that point here on a daily Jack Kirby weblog?

You can try and spin this in any number of other directions all you want. But you can’t distort my message.

And to reiterate, that post symbolizes a change of direction that is happening in my life, and a change of direction at Kirby Dynamics. Don’t worry, it ain’t your fault, I decided to pull the plug on this thing months ago unless the Kirby Museum will let me use their secret stash of pencil scans they’ve been hoarding for a decade. I’ve been trying to access the HQ Kirby pencil scans for more than 10 years. I really wanted to study those things, break them down and share what I found. Yes, I have been allowed to use 3 or 4 of the scans, and I thank the Museum for taking the time to send me those scans so I could research Jack’s work, but it was a hassle to get them. I’d like to stop having to crawl on my knees and beg every time I need one scan for a weblog I do 365-days a year. I just don’t have time for that any more.

I want to see if they can just dump the stuff on a flashdrive for me. I’ll buy the flashdrive myself and mail it to them in a self-addressed package. I’ll even pay them for the effort. It ain’t like I’m gonna sell the stuff on eBay. Only a few people are even really interested in that material anyway. If the Museum does eventually post it all, people will just “binge” download all of it at once never to return to the Museum again. So why not just let me use the material now? I’m trying to promote Kirby!

Congratulations to the great Joe Sinnott, one of the best inkers ever to work in comics, some say the best (Joe is my favorite inker) and one of the nicest people ever to work in the comics industry.

Excerpt from the article:

These days, Sinnott is gratified that many of the characters he inked have connected with new generations, including through blockbuster films. But even their Hollywood success brings a sense of mixed blessing.

“Think of what the movie studios make on this these days,” Sinnott says about comic-book films. “Jack worked seven days a week. I worked six. We had steady deadlines all the time. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes the work didn’t come out the way you wanted to. But we loved it so much — doing the drawing.

“But there isn’t a one of us that feels like [we’re being fairly] compensated now. And we’re not getting any younger. …

“You would think Disney would throw us a bone.”

Sinnott thinks, too, of those colleagues who have died and deserved more. “Gene Colan, Jack, Don Heck — we were in on the beginning of these characters.”

As another means of compensation, Sinnott wishes, too, that he could get back much of his original art.

“The return of the artwork — that’s another [story],” Sinnott tells Comic Riffs. “In the ’50s and ’60s, they destroyed [so much of] the artwork.”

Other art from that era, Sinnott says, was lifted straight from the Marvel offices. “I did over 100 covers with Jack Kirby,” he says, “but we got back hardly nothing. … Even when they started giving the art back, co-workers took [other] people’s art. … It was laying around the office — early Spider-Man and Fanastic Four. Guys would come in and they had these big portfolios, and when no one was watching, they put the artwork in them.”

Sinnott says someone once gave him a magazine that spotlighted the sale of an original Silver Surfer page. “When I did that page, I was probably paid around $40 for inking it,” Sinnott says. “It sold for $125,000.”

“We did get some art back,” he notes, “but when we think of what was stolen — what we didn’t get back.

“I probably did a thousand pages with Jack Kirby.”

Sinnott sighs for a moment.

“Not to take anything away from Jim Lee and Frank Miller,” the Hall of Fame inker says about profiting from one’s original art, “but they came along at the right time.”

I got a bunch of emails from people about the post on economic collpase. To answer one of the questions: the chart says it’s in billions, but it means 56,000-billions, in other words multiply a billion times 56,000, that equals 56 trillion, as if anyone can fathom that large a number.

A trillion is equal to a thousand billions (1,000 x 1,000,000,000)

1,000,000,000,000 = one trillion

So our current national debt is: 56,000 x 1,000,000,000 = $56,000,000,000,000 (I think, I’m not great at math).

It’s an incomprehensible number.

And another reader mentioned the national debt clock says the debt is about 16 trillion. Here’s an article that explains the 50 trillion number briefly.

Measuring America’s debt on an accrual, rather than cash basis, grows the current shortfall from $15.7 trillion to over $50 trillion. America’s debt is traditionally measured on a cash basis, which values the current debt at $15.7 trillion. However, the government regularly releases a report called the Financial Report of the United States Government in which it gives an estimate of the U.S. budget picture on an accrual basis for individual programs.

The inclusion of all of America’s long term unfunded liabilities into a single measure paints a far more difficult future picture for the U.S. over the longer term in which debt totals over $50 trillion dollars.

As with most cost estimates, the primary culprit in these estimates is Medicare, which further highlights the criticality of addressing this mandatory spending program. However, the sheer magnitude of these estimates shows that many deficit reduction initiatives simply fail to move the needle when compared with the stark shortfalls outlined by both the cash and accrual methods of accounting.

Now that you’re all back from the brainwashing session at the comic con where you were taught movies about comic books are the most important thing happening in the world, here’s just one real news story you might want to think about:

Basically what this story means is that you better hope (a) you are able to work every day until you die, and (b) you better hope that you have a job for the rest of your life — because all the retirement money in the entire nation is going to be gone soon. Therefore I encourage you all to eat right and stay in shape so you can run a cash register at Walmart until you’re 92-years-old, er, unless they’ve replaced Walmart cashiers with robots by then.

If you can’t meet those two criteria above? You’re going to have to pray that (a) the US Government gives you free food, free water, and free shelter for the rest of your life, or (b) there’s actually no other option than “a”, unless you live somewhere where you can be a hunter/gatherer.

I love the line in the article about the fact that the Detroit bankruptcy might be unconstitutional. What the IRS is doing targeting special interest groups is clearly unconstitutional but no worries about that. Our military blowing away foreign civilians without our consent is unconstitutional but no worries about that. The government locking up whistle-blowers and journalists for exercising their first amendment right is unconstitutional but no worries about that. The NSA collecting every single piece of digital information in the world is clearly unconstitutional, but no worries about that.

I could post a lot more on this sort of thing, but I want to be careful not to use this weblog as a soapbox to discuss current events. Give me a few days to go through a couple more things… then I’ll try to get back to exclusively showing Jack’s artwork since I know that’s why most of you are here.

In my defense when you do a daily weblog about one subject sometimes it’s hard not to go off on a tangent once in awhile. And this stuff is kinda’ important if you don’t know it’s going on. Here’s another article from today that barely scratches the surface of the problem.

To put it simply the red line is our economy which is technically doing okay now, but the blue line is our debt which we can never, ever, ever pay back — so it will go up infinitely until America itself declares bankruptcy — which means that at some point the American, and probably global economy will totally collapse. It doesn’t look like we have too much time left until that happens. The meltdown will almost definitely happen by 2020, it could even happen by next summer. Maybe even by the end of this summer — that’s how precarious the situation is. It could really happen any day. Imagine that blue line as a big tsunami headed for our shores.

There’s one good show on the internet where they talk about the real economy if you want to be informed: The Keiser Report. Just go to the link that says The Keiser Report and you can search the archives. Yeah I know it’s on RT which does show a lot of Russian propaganda, but this is a good show. You would never see an honest discussion like this on something like CNBC. Watching a corporate-run network like CNN today in 2013 is like watching a sitcom — you would get more informative information about current events from watching Ted Baxter on re-runs of the 70s Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I know a lot of the people over the years “prepping” for economic collapse kind of look like they are nuts, and I’m sure some of them are (because we all are to a degree). And of course, the military will just take all your stored-up rations anyway if there is a real food shortage, hoarding will be considered treason.

But you still might want to at least make sure you have at least a month’s (or more) worth of water and food on hand for your whole family just in case the thousands of economic experts predicting disaster are correct and a total economic collapse very soon isn’t just possible, it’s pretty much inevitable. At least you can dig in for awhile until the chaos settles down, if it ever really settles down. Take it from someone who went through multiple hurricanes in Florida over the years, take time out of your schedule to make sure you have plenty of emergency supplies and your family has an emergency plan. Think about how you will take care of business if the power is out for a significant amount of time, or if cell phone service is down for a long time, if gas lines are long and if the shelves in local food shops are empty.

These are just basic things you should think about and act on or you’re going to feel real stupid if you can’t take care of your family. And of course basic preparation is really “prepping” for a best case scenario where maybe you have a period of months where things are hectic — if things go really badly for many months or for years, emergency supplies will only last a short time, but I still suggest you play it smart and take basic precautions for disaster.

Here’s a comic I did last year on the 2012 Mayan apocalypse scare and prepping.

I think what’s happening now is a lot different than the fear of an oncoming apocalypse humans tend to go through every generation. Anyone who has crunched the numbers can tell you the American financial system is genuinely in big trouble. And that’s really putting it mildly. There is no real way to keep kicking the debt can down the road.

Even if a miracle happens and America can muddle through for a few more decades, unless revolutionary changes occur in our economic policies, and really our whole socioeconomic system, our kids and grandkids are going to be living in a far different country than the one our grandparents fought to defend in the second world war. Detroit may be the future of America.

Sorry for the bad news, and I’m sure many of you will disagree with what I am saying especially if you get your information from the corporate news like FOX or MSNBC, but I advise you to be aware of what’s going on. You don’t want to be caught totally unprepared.

Okay, that’s it for the public service announcement, go back to watching movies about comic books.

Marvel and The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) set the bar high for the rest of the industry with The Avengers last year. Ever since the release of Iron Man in 2008, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was pieced together so lovingly and carefully that fans eagerly anticipated every new film in the series. Joss Whedon, a man known for his passion for comic books and sci-fi, was brought it to tie it all together with The Avengers, and the result was a critical masterpiece with a score of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, which also became the highest-grossing film in 2012, at $623 million.

Despite achieving huge success with The Avengers and Iron Man 3, Disney failed to learn a crucial lesson from its past failures. Last year, Disney released John Carter, based on a 1912 novel by Tarzan writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. The film cost $250 million to produce but only grossed $282 million worldwide. Disney then followed that disappointing film up with this year’s The Lone Ranger, which cost $225 million but has only generated $147.5 million in global box office sales to date.

Both films were unsuccessful, desperate attempts at launching a new franchise to follow up The Pirates of the Caribbean, which generated a combined a $4.7 billion in revenue over the course of four films between 2003 and 2011.

After the failure of The Lone Ranger, Disney should finally realize that it needs to stop digging in the past and rebooting extremely dated characters. Instead, all it needs to do is rely on the growth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its upcoming Star Wars films to carry its film studio division.

Two things to learn from this. One, a few bombs and there will be a huge shake-up at Disney-Marvel.

Secondly, if the Marvel movies start to really bomb? If the franchise tanks and people would rather vomit before they see another dumb Iron Man movie? Ooo eee, baby — look out!

Disney-Marvel may be a corporate behemoth right now and the money’s a’flowin’, but a few bad decisons can wreck any company, and as I’ve told you several times here eventually one big mega-corporation is eventually going to gobble up everything, so god only knows what the future of the Marvel intellectual properties will be. They may be the equivalent of the Greek pantheon of Gods and Goddesses for years to come with millions of worshippers, or the Marvel pantheon may become as obsolete as the old gods…

I’d love to see new voices and new ideas emerge in the cinema, but right now I wouldn’t be surprised if American cinema continues to shove Spider-man and Batman movies down our throats for decades.